Meet the Makers: Rich “FilthieRich” Bantegui

Welcome to Meet the Makers, a regular series where we'll be introducing you to the passionate artists, designers, engineers, and developers at Amazon Game Studios. This week, we're excited to introduce you to Rich “FilthieRich” Bantegui, a marketing manager at AGS, Orange County.

What do you do at AGS?

I’m a marketing manager at AGS, focused on business partnerships and broadcaster relations. I also have a seat on the Breakaway game team where I provide ideas, insight, feedback and recommendations.

What’s the best part about making games?

The act of bringing the community together and building with each other is what inspires me to work within games. For Breakaway, I’m excited about working with the community to create everything from combo videos and strategy guides, to challenging the meta and making comedic content.

Also, I get to play video games during lunch time.

What’s the most challenging part about making games?

The creative nature of games attracts incredibly passionate and committed people. And there are times when it can be intimidating to speak your mind, especially with creative content, like how a character looks, or whether a specific game mechanic is fun. However, since my start in games, meetings that welcome challenging voices turn out to be extremely productive, fun, and provide the best way to build great experiences for our community.

How did you get into the industry? When did you start?

As a kid, I spent my days in the arcades and nights playing console and PC games. I got big into the competitive side of games and made my mark by winning gaming tournaments across the world in Street Fighter, Tekken, Quake, and racing games. Competing was a platform for me to showcase self-expression, style, creativity and a bridge for me to connect with the wider community of gamers and developers.

In the early 2000’s, I kick-started my gaming career and worked on Quake, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Guitar Hero and the Tony Hawk series. I later explored the world of esports and worked with World Cyber Games and Major League Gaming and introduced fighting games into the league. This was the opportunity that gave me the chance to meet one of my hero development teams and eventually join “Team TEKKEN”.

Many years later, my passion for games took me in the direction of working within community and I found myself talking to the studio head of Amazon Game Studios Patrick Gilmore. We were aligned in the vision of building games with the community and now we’re working on Breakaway together!

What makes Amazon Games a unique place to work?

Amazon Games is awesome because of the internal technology that simplifies the process for my day to day activities. This gives me more time to focus on the things I’m most passionate about. We also have a really cool set of arcades, pinball machines and lots of competition to play any competitive game during breaks and lunch time.